Now with 100% more LESBIAN poetry!

I found a bunch of poetry assignments from undergrad on my old hard drive, and figure this is as sound a place to store them as any.

Poem Beginning with A Line By Thom Gunn: 

And it draws so oddly on the sexual that I am confused,

confused by the stilted spill of breath across my fingers,

by your lipstick, slick and glossy on my palm.

We steep between cool sheets, all my intention

stacked and thick upon my shoulders, my chest wracked

with the effort of your breathing.  White lace-wrought gown,

no paler than the peppermint-rose lacquer of your skin, whispers air

into the space between our hands.

I wrap a shaking palm around your knuckles, strain to

swallow my own thirst.

We struggle through a soft and hollow breath that

lifts my name unbitten from your tongue, pulls

syllables through lips as smooth and foreign as the melted

sweet of Swiss-pressed chocolate petals, the tender

sheen of Asiatic silk,

and when exhaustion melts across your cheeks,

your ankles fused with mine

in sweet impermanence,

I close my eyes, remember eight and plucking

April lilacs from a tree, smearing pollen on my forehead,

trailing home to file them between Jude and Revelations.

I pressed them between half-transparent pages, slammed

the cover:  let the weight and dust leach oil from their perforated

stems, the subtle dampness that loss carries curling thin

throughout the chapters as veins faded, petals pale and driven flat,

until I rifled through the text, unburied treasure,

lifted weeks of effort slowly towards the window, watched it crumble

into powder on the rug.

It’s odd, I know, the business of salvation:

the chalk-streak line we hopscotch between pressing close and pressing on.